A North Dakota pipeline has hemorrhaged about 1 million gallons of oil-drilling saltwater into the ground of a native Indian reservation, with some of the byproduct suspected to have leaked into a lake that provides drinking water.

The spill of a toxic byproduct of oil and natural gas production
at the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation was discovered on
Tuesday.

The cleanup is expected to last for weeks, according to Miranda
Jones, vice president of environmental safety at Crestwood
Midstream Partners LP. A subsidiary of Crestwood - Arrow Pipeline
LLC - owns the underground pipeline.

Jones believes the leak started over the Fourth of July weekend,
but was only detected when the company was sorting through
production loss reports, according to AP.

"This is something no company wants on their record, and we
are working diligently to clean it up," Jones said.

Yet Karolin Rockvoy, a McKenzie County emergency manager, visited
the site of the leak and said, based on the amount of devastation
done to local vegetation, the spill had probably gone undetected
for some time.

The pipeline was not equipped with technology that alerts
operators of a leak, Jones said. Last year, the state legislature
rejected legislation mandating pipeline flow meters and cutoff
switches.

It is as yet unknown how much of this saltwater - between 10 and
30 times saltier than sea water and considered an environmental
hazard by the state of North Dakota - found its way into Bear Den
Bay, which leads to Lake Sakakawea.

The lake supplies water for the reservation, where the Mandan,
Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes live in an area of western North
Dakota that is experiencing an unprecedented drilling boom.

Crestwood Midstream Partners LP and tribal officials maintain,
though, that the spill is controlled and has not impacted the
lake.

"We have a berm and a dike around it, around that bay area,
to keep it from going into the lake," said the Three
Affiliated Tribes Chairman Tex Hall.

The briny saltwater byproduct from drilling could contain
petroleum and residue from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, an
energy intensive process that involves the injection of highly
pressurized water, sand, and chemicals into layers of rock. The
practice concerns geologists, and human and environmental health
officials alike.

Kris Roberts, environmental geologist with the North Dakota
Department of Health, said the spill had already caused
widespread damage at the site.

Saltwater spills in the state have increased as the North Dakota
energy boom has evolved. The state produced 25.5 million barrels
of brine in 2012. There were 141 pipeline leaks reported in the
state that same year, 99 of which spilled around 8,000 barrels of
saltwater, AP reports.

State regulators say about 6,150 barrels of the leaked saltwater
were recovered. One barrel equals 42 gallons of fluid.

Drilling at the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation represents a
major portion of the state’s oil production, as more than 300,000
of North Dakota’s 1 million barrels of oil produced daily come
from the area, according to figures from the state’s Department
of Mineral Resources.

Possibly the worst environmental disaster ever in the state
occurred in 2006, when a broken oil pipeline leaked more than a
million gallons of saltwater into a creek, aquifer, and pond.
Saltwater from the rupture spewed unnoticed for weeks into a
tributary of the Yellowstone River near Alexander, North Dakota,
causing the death of many fish, turtles, and plants.

Cleanup efforts connected with that spill are ongoing.

Saltwater pipelines in western North Dakota have since been
connected in an elaborate network that empties into hundreds of
disposal wells, where the brine is permanently stored
underground.

Fracking wastewater injected into storage wells has been linked
to drastically increased seismic activity in areas with similar
energy booms as North Dakota, including Oklahoma.

The US Geological Survey has said that “the injected wastewater
counteracts the frictional forces on faults and, in effect,
‘pries them apart’, thereby facilitating earthquake slip.”